Apocrypha

I'm good with God.

God already warned people thousands of times throughout the Bible and throughout the Apocrypha and all other religious texts.

Hell, even the Muslims don't like fucking atheists.

There's not a lot of religions out there that actually like non-believers.

I don't think that we should put our walls up and defend it.

I'm always open to new information and, you know, Steven's doing a great job on the Apocrypha, on some of the Apocrypha, specifically within the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some of the inconsistencies or problems with some of the stuff that was in there, and I think it's very interesting.

And like I said, do with the information as you will.

[laughs] You know, that was-

To the left of the Bibles, there are anthologies of Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and what survives from Ugarit and the Hittites.

And around the Bibles are half a dozen books about ancient pagan cult and mystery religions, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls and a couple of anthologies of Second Temple Apocrypha, and then the early Christian stuff, 2nd and 3rd century church fathers, the Nag Hammadi Library, more Apocrypha, Jerome, two collections of Manichaean scriptures, and right next to them St. Augustine, just to remind the old grouch of his roots, an anthology of the Talmud and one of the Haggadah, or stories from the Talmud, and then two good scholarly Qurans, then two one-volume anthologies of the Hadith scholars Al-Bukhari and Muslim Ibn Hajjaj.

The whole stack of books I just described, generally the most important primary texts of the ancient Near Eastern and Abrahamic religions, is about a meter thick.

I like looking at it sometimes.

Prophecy concretized into doctrine and tradition.

There was still continuous creativity within all three religions.

Apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts, together with the caprices of individual theologians, did rattle the foundations of hardening orthodoxies as Pharisees debated Sadducees, Christological controversies shook the early church, and Mu'tazilites vexed traditionalist Hadith scholars.

The three religions had dings and dents as the problem of evil remained a tough cookie century after century, and monotheism has never quite been a warm enough jacket to keep away all the cold and hard weather of life.

Uh, Jerome's a, a good one because when I was Protestant, I used Jerome, especially doing a doctoral work that covered the subject of canonicity.

He was almost the go-to every single time because he put doubt particularly on the deuterocanonical books, uh, as Protestants would call them the Apocrypha.

And, and the interesting about that, Cy, is that they'll use a lot of his early works, and one of the things that I started doing since becoming a Catholic is actually revisiting Jerome-

Okay

... just to make it quick, 'cause you got a-

Go ahead

... a caller's, uh, I know that, is that the canon, the, the, the canon was two-thirds filled by the first century, and it was accepted, and the main thing was over the w- books that were going in, the writings, and then of course all the other, the Deuteronomistic books, uh, the Apoc- Apocrypha and all that, was integ- Mainly they were probably rejected because a lot of the Jewish Christians accepted them, and that's probably one of the reasons why too.

Plus they were also k- kind of cracking down on what they thought was an excess of, uh, angelology in some of those books.